Jiaxing

On July 30, 1921, French Concession police raided a secret meeting in Shanghai. Thirteen delegates — including Mao Zedong — relocated a hundred kilometres southwest to Jiaxing, rented a tourist boat on South Lake, and completed the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The Red Boat became one of the Party's most sacred symbols. Jiaxing became, officially, the birthplace of a movement that would govern 1.4 billion people.

A century later, Jiaxing remains economically overshadowed by the two cities flanking it. Shanghai sits less than a hundred kilometres east. Hangzhou sits about the same distance west. The Yangtze River Delta megalopolis — 27 cities, 163 million people, 39% of China's GDP — treats Jiaxing as connective tissue rather than a destination. A 2014 study by Chinese urban researchers asked the question directly: why does Jiaxing not benefit from its geographical advantages?

The answer is source-sink dynamics. Resources — talent, capital, corporate headquarters, brand prestige — flow toward the two gravitational centres on either side. Jiaxing captures some spillover: Abbott, Philips, Mars, Heineken, and Walmart all operate facilities here, and 316 new foreign-invested projects launched in a single year, 73 of them exceeding $100 million. But the investment comes because Jiaxing is cheap relative to Shanghai, not because it is Jiaxing. The city functions as an overflow basin for demand that the primary cities cannot absorb at their price points.

The industrial transformation tells the same story from a different angle. Jiaxing's traditional economy — textiles, leather, chemical fibres — has been systematically replaced by semiconductors, biomedical manufacturing, intelligent equipment, and new energy. The Jiaxing Science City hosts microelectronics production and pharmaceutical facilities. The transition is real and capital-intensive. But it mirrors Shanghai's industrial priorities so closely that Jiaxing's competitive advantage remains primarily geographic arbitrage: the same industries, at lower cost, within commuting distance of a larger talent pool.

The Red Boat creates an unusual political dynamic. Jiaxing receives attention from central leadership disproportionate to its economic weight — visits, infrastructure investment, demonstration zone status in the Yangtze River Delta integration plan. Jiashan county, within Jiaxing's jurisdiction, was selected as part of the cross-provincial development demonstration zone alongside Shanghai's Qingpu district and Jiangsu's Wujiang district. Political symbolism generates real resource allocation.

Yet the city illustrates a principle that biology demonstrates repeatedly: occupying the centre of a resource gradient does not guarantee capture. Organisms positioned between two dominant competitors often get squeezed out of both niches rather than accessing the best of both. Jiaxing has avoided that fate through industrial diversification and political capital, but its fundamental challenge remains unchanged — it is defined by what it sits between rather than what it is.